242 percent

Bankrupt crypto bank pays back with mega returns

Mega return for a bankrupt company: 232,000 private customers of the bankrupt crypto lender Genesis and the crypto exchange Gemini will receive their Bitcoins and co. back at the current value of more than two billion dollars. They will receive a return of 242 percent on their assets that have been blocked since January 2023, as Gemini announced.

At the time, customers had lent their cryptocurrencies to Genesis in return for interest payments via the Gemini Earn program. The product, which was operated jointly by Gemini and Genesis, collected Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies with a value of 940 million dollars in November 2022. The program was then frozen in the wake of a crash - the Bitcoin price had fallen from around 67,000 dollars in November 2021 to around 17,000 dollars a year later.

However, the bitcoins were retained. Now they are to be returned - but not as a cash payout at the value at the end of 2022, but as a retransfer of the original cryptocurrency. As the price of Bitcoin has multiplied again since then to currently around 67,000 dollars, customers can expect this mega return.

Customers first
New York Attorney General Letitia James had sued Genesis, Gemini and Genesis' parent company Digital Currency Group over the program. She had argued that the Gemini Earn program was "fraud" and misled investors. In February, it reached a settlement that obliged Genesis to compensate its customers before other creditors - including the state of New York and the Digital Currency Group.

The latter had demanded that customers should be compensated on the basis of the cryptocurrency value as at January 2023. In this case, a large part of the current possible sales proceeds would have remained with DCG. However, a judge rejected this. According to Genesis, the lawsuit meant that the company was not restarted, but instead bankruptcy liquidation was sought.